Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever novel Chapter 266

Chapter 266: Chapter 266 - Better safe than sorry

The water was cold and dark, but Voren didn’t hesitate. The moment he caught their scent cutting through the night air, sharp and wrong, he moved. Not up. Not toward the surface where they’d be waiting.

He pushed deeper, cutting through the current with long strokes, letting the water swallow him whole. He knew these waterways better than most people knew their own backyards. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Every tunnel. Every hidden outlet carved into the rock walls below. He came up on the far side, fingers gripping wet stone as he hauled himself through a narrow passage and climbed until his feet hit solid ground again.

He was a good stretch away from where he’d gone in.

What he didn’t count on was the sound of footsteps right beside him.

Not Seraphine’s.

He pressed flat against the rock face and held his breath, scanning the darkness. That’s when he caught movement in the distance, a cluster of figures tightening around Seraphine like a noose.

His jaw locked. He didn’t think twice. The shift came fast and hard, bones rearranging themselves as Bloodfang took shape, and Voren launched himself into the trees.

The assassins never saw it coming.

They went down one after another, each one hitting the ground with a finality that left no room for argument. When the last one stopped moving, Bloodfang’s paws pressed into the earth and his chest rumbled low.

He was already turning toward Seraphine when something made him stop dead.

Her wolf.

Bloodfang went completely still, every muscle locked, eyes fixed on the creature standing in the clearing ahead.

I knew it. The thought moved through him like a current. I knew there was something different about her.

Voren felt it too, that sharp jolt of recognition breaking through everything else. Hold on. Are you absolutely sure? The gifted wolf is supposed to be a story. Something the old ones told to scare people.

That’s no story standing out there. Bloodfang’s gaze didn’t move from her. Look at her. Wild. Unafraid. She loves this the same way I do. She loves the blood.

And he wasn’t wrong. Her wolf moved through what was left of the fight with something that went beyond training or instinct. There was joy in it. The raw, honest kind.

Voren turned it over in his head, trying to make it fit with everything he already knew, and then slowly, it did. Piece by piece, it all clicked into place. Seraphine’s instincts. The way she read situations before they fully developed.

The knowledge she carried that seemed to come from nowhere. The way she fought like she’d been doing it for a hundred years instead of just this one lifetime.

Her wolf had been giving her all of it.

The gifted wolf was the only one of its kind that worked that way, passing its power directly into its human host not as strength or speed alone but as knowing. Deep, bone-level knowledge. It was also the only wolf that ran anywhere close to Bloodfang’s level of pure, uncut ferocity.

And Ravyn had let her go.

The thought sat in Voren’s chest like something heavy and blunt. Ravyn had never even bothered to look. If he had, really looked, he would have known. He would have moved mountains to keep her.

Stop her. Voren cut through Bloodfang’s focus like a blade. She can’t kill that one. Not yet. We need him talking first. Someone sent these people and I want to know who.

It’s us.